Virgin Blue voted as best budget carrier for 4th time
Budget carrier Virgin Blue is once gain cited as the top low cost airline in the Australia/Asia Pacific region at the Skytrax world airline awards held in Hamburg, garnering the honour for four consecutive times and edging out Tiger Airways and Qantas subsidiary, Jetstar.
Skytrax chairman Edward Plaisted lauded Virgin for its achievement and said that the airline "was clearly capturing the customer's hearts in what is an extremely competitive region for low cost airlines."
Skytrax also awarded the world's best low-cost airline to the Malaysian carrier AirAsia for the second consecutive year, while Air New Zealand was adjudged as the overall best carrier in Australia/Pacific region trouncing Qantas and Virgin's long-haul airway V Australia.
Air NZ has so far collected its second award in as many days as the UK-based 'Which? Awards' voted the airline as the best carrier of the year.
As for the mainstream category, Skytrax picked Asiana Airlines as the Airline of the year and followed respectively by Singapore Airlines and Qatar Airways with the Air NZ again landing a spot in the fifth place.
Australian flag-carrier Qantas only managed to secure the seventh place in the overall category but it was voted as the top premium economy class by Skytrax, which has been handing out the citations for 11 years now and based the current awards on a survey of 17.9 million air travellers who were polled between July 2009 and April 2010.
In a related news, Queensland Airports Ltd has reported that the three terminals under its management, Gold Coast, Townsville and Mount Isa, collectively experienced a 10.3 percent spike in passenger traffic in April, which is an improvement from the same time a year ago.
VBA Price at posting:
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